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Just when the McCann saga couldn't get any more agonising, along came a raft of developments last week that began to achieve what you would hope would be impossible: turning a little missing girl into Madeleine Inc.
A London agency is hawking around various small girls as Madeleine lookalikes. United States television brought a team of psychics to bear on the disappearance, as part of what they no doubt hoped would be a money-spinner of a show. Her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, are exploring the possibility of selling the book and film rights to the case.
Unlike others, the motive of the McCanns is not profit. But it is, nevertheless, financial: the keeping afloat of the Find Madeleine Campaign. Set up in the immediate wake of her disappearance last May, it quickly raised £1.2 million ($2.9 million), in part from public donations. But that sum is fast shrinking. Estimated to have only £346,000 come March, it will, at the present rate of spending, be gone by July.
The biggest drain on it is Metodo 3, the Spanish detective agency now two-thirds of the way through a six-month contract. Speculation grows that its contract will not be renewed.
Metodo has never recovered from the extraordinary swaggering comments of its director, Francisco Marco, when he boasted in December that not only did they know who abducted Madeleine, but that she could, in that most ill-fated of phrases, "be home by Christmas".
So have the McCanns wasted £300,000 ($747,185) on the Spanish equivalent of Inspector Clouseau? Or are Metodo 3 slowly making progress?
The firm was set up in 1985 and claims to have "correspondents in every European Union country". It runs a hotline for the public to report sightings and suspicions, and says it has been following up reports, concentrating most of its efforts and agents in Morocco and Portugal. They go and see the people who ring their hotline if they think the tip is strong enough and liaise with the local police. The agency insists all of its 40 staff are involved in the Madeleine case.
Nagging doubts have always persisted about the suitability of Metodo 3 to solve the case. The firm is the biggest private detective agency in Spain, but its reputation is based on a corporate caseload - mostly investigating fraud.
Manuel Marlaska, a journalist from Spain's best-known investigative magazine, Interviu, said: "They are the most prestigious detective agency in Spain. But the work they are doing now seems strange. They do not have any experience of working with such a high-profile case. Also I have no knowledge that they have been involved in finding people."
Yet although their main work is fraud, patent falsification and information protection, their biggest claim to fame was in helping to track down Spanish spy "who came back from the dead", Francisco Paesa.
Paesa was an arms dealer who, while working for the Spanish secret services, sold Eta missiles fitted with radio transmitters so that they could be tracked. After seven years on the run, he was traced by Metodo 3 using tip-offs and financial records.
But a 4-year-old child has no bank accounts or credit cards.
- INDEPENDENT
